SOURCEBOOK

Get your copy of the first ever Digital Experience Sourcebook from EContent, which is packed with information about the past, present, and future of all the topics that matter to digital content professionals.

There was a very important birthday this week that you probably forgot. Don't worry, you don't need to run out and get a card to apologize. The World Wide Web doesn't mind that you forgot its 25th birthday. But you should probably feel guilty about letting this milestone pass unnoticed because, according to Pew, the World Wide Web has made your life better.

According to HubSpot's 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report, 23% of marketers invested in blogs and social media last year. That number seems shockingly low, and could indicate that some decision-making executives are still wary of social media. EContent talked to Thomas White, co-founder and CEO of the C-Suite Network-a company designed to enable c-suite professionals to maximize the potential of peer networks and social media-to better understand the C-Suite's hesitance to embrace social media.

DNN, a provider of marketing solutions, released the latest version of Evoq Social, an online community solution that fosters and enhances conversations among customers, employees, partners, and prospects. The new version ships with an enhanced set of features and options for deploying social groups, encouraging conversations, and enhancing collaboration.

A few weeks back, a good friend sent me an article that appeared on one of my favorite websites, ThoughtCatalog. It had me at the headline: "This Is How Social Media Is Ruining Your Life." See, last summer I wrote a column pointing out that many people use social media as nothing more than means to promote themselves, not to engage in honest communication with friends. For a while I believed that maybe I was the only one who thought this, but, thanks to ThoughtCatalog, I know now I am not alone.

OverDrive announced that it has acquired TeachersNotebook.com, an online marketplace for teacher-created curriculum materials for K-12 education. TeachersNotebook enables teachers to browse free and low-cost instructional resources, and to create their own shop where others may purchase original materials. The website operates with a "teachers helping teachers" mentality of engaging and educating students of all ages and optimizing the classroom experience.

Trover, a community-driven visual guide serving travelers and local culture enthusiasts, announced three free photo widgets that provide any website the opportunity to showcase high quality location-based photos created and curated by Trover's community. Available immediately, the Trover widgets make it possible to quickly publish geo-tagged images, stories, and insider tips documented by the Trover community to help bloggers and websites deliver unique visual photo guides.

John Wiley & Sons, Inc., announced a new partnership with Kudos, a start-up service designed to help academics and learned societies measure, monitor, and maximize the visibility and impact of their published articles. From April 2014, the Kudos platform will be freely available across a representative trial of articles from the Global Research portfolio.

Stephanie Moritz, head of PR and social media at ConAgra Foods and an instructor with the Digital Professional Institute (DPI), says that many social media features will evolve to meet the needs of both companies and consumers. In fact, Moritz has seven specific predictions.

In a February 19 blog post, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook intends to buy Whats App. For a total of $16 billion in cash and stock (yes...billion). There's another $3 billion in stock for Whats App employees but that will vest over four years. Whats App is a cross-platform messaging system that, according to the post, has over 450 million people using the service each month with 70% of them active on a given day.

What does it mean to be online today? Increasingly, it means being part of the "now" and interactively tapping into the communal and cultural zeitgeist. And that, of course, means being connected to some form of social media. From aNobii to Zooppa, social networking sites are dominating cyberspace and becoming impossible for digital publishers and electronic content providers to ignore, and for good reason. People everywhere want to be part of an electronic conversation that is happening at this very moment via popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, and Yelp. They want to chime in with opinions; share ideas, photos, and videos with family, friends, and followers; stay updated with favorite movers, shakers, and brands; and remain engaged in a dynamic digital dialogue, whether at home, at work, or on-the-go.

While some stats suggest that Google+ usage rivals Facebook, skeptics point out that anyone with a Google Mail account is, by default, a Google+ user whether they actually "use" the tool or not. On top of that, Google recently created an online uproar through its requirement that users of its other property, YouTube, have a Google+ account in order to access the site. And, those who use Google+'s most popular feature-Hangouts-are also considered Google+ users, whether they actively use other features of not. Still, while the site's statistics may involve a lot of smoke and mirrors, most believe that it's an option that can't be ignored, primarily because of its impact on SEO.

It wasn't so long ago that I was writing about Facebook Stories as the social media giant's first steps into the content marketing game. Now Facebook is putting an even bigger emphasis on content, with Facebook Paper (check out this video to see what some experts think about the new app). The Flipboard-esque app is, in essence, just a sleeker way to get and share the same content you see in your normal Facebook feed-combined with a news reader.

Interacting Technology, the Israeli born social vertical building platform, announced the worldwide launch of Moovz.com, a social networking platform and mobile application for the gay community. Since its Beta launch in October 2013, Moovz has been available online and on mobile devices worldwide. The platform currently operates in eight different languages and launched with over 25 million interactions by users worldwide.

Love motivates us to create things that share that story with the world. And tapping into that desire with your customers forms a bond that will last a lifetime. Do your customers love you? Do they love your products and services? Do they love you enough to post a picture of you, sing a song about you, or write a eulogy for you? The cold, calculating world of business comes down to customer choice between something they love and something they don't. But why is love such a big deal?

Facebook wants your eyeballs, and isn't about to let any competitor go unchallenged. This time around, the social media powerhouse has Flipboard in its sights as reports of the impending release of Facebook Paper filter out. According to re/code, Paper could be out sometime this month and will aggregate your news into a Flipboard-like app for mobile users.

Memorease and Milestones introduced its own approach to social networking by providing platform to upload and share any type of digital content with a personally selected list of family and friends. Serving as an alternative to social networks that actually sell and never delete uploaded content, Memorease and Milestones guarantees a private place to share, manage, and edit any kind of digital content.

Josh Miller, co-founder and CEO of Branch and Potluck, announced on January 14, 2014, that the company has been acquired by Facebook and will be joining the Facebook Conversations group in New York City. Miller says that Facebook has asked the Branch team to build their product at "Facebook scale."

VisualGraph announced on its site that it is now part of Pinterest. VisualGraph is a machine-driven search platform that specializes in visual content. According to the post from founder Kevin Jing, "Our approach is to combine the state-of-the-art machine vision tools, such as object recognition (e.g. shoes, faces), with large-scale distributed search and machine learning infrastructures."

An Android-based TV stick aimed at enabling families to communicate, share content, interact and play via the TV -- no matter where each individual may be located -- is to be launched at CES, Las Vegas. The new HDMI TV stick called Bob -- and developed by Meet-Bob Ltd. -- is designed to provide families with intuitive and exciting interactive communication options.

So much conversation around the importance of social media for business has focused on its role in marketing. How to engage customers with a brand on Twitter in a way that translates to new sales? How to capture a large Facebook fan base and then transform it into brand champions and paying customers? But a new index from Sprout Social, which provides social media engagement, publishing, and analytic tools, shows that social media's most exciting opportunity-and challenge-may be the provision of customer service.

This year, I finally have a New Year's resolution I think I can keep. In 2014, I'm not using social media. or at least I won't be using the social media I'm already familiar with. Instead, I am vowing to move on to new social shores and try out new tools and networks.

If you turned to Snapchat for the privacy its private, vanishing messaging provided you will be more than a little disappointed to hear the company has been hacked. It started when Gibson Security claimed Snapchat's API was vulnerable. Snapchat responded on its blog by saying there were "theorhetical" dangers, and that it had implemented safeguards to help address book information safe. But then a hacker group responded by posting 4.6 million usernames and phone numbers in a downloadable database-just in time to ring in the new year.

You may have heard a rumor that Facebook is dying. Millennials are supposedly ditching the platform. Because grandparents are flocking to the service others are leaving in droves. Don't believe the hype. To misquote Mark Twain, the rumors of Facebook's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Your goal, like many content creators is clicks, right? Attention, time, trust, affinity. Right? Look no further than Facebook. But (caveat coming) bring your wallet.